From Kenya to Laos, the people and their stories take centre stage (Image: Jeff Rotman/Getty)

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A journey to the heart of the planet we made by Gaia Vince is a story of optimism about how 10 billion people can live together

THE aptly named Gaia Vince has wandered the world seeking the truth about the Anthropocene, the name given to the new era in which humans dominate the planet and its fundamental processes.

The result is a marvellous book: high-class reportage rooted in good science. At the same time, Vince has created a love letter to life on the road and to the people she meets: an ode to humanity.

Most people writing about the Anthropocene tell doom-laden tales of eco-apocalypse. Look how we messed it up, they say. Vince does some of that. There is a short "situation report" at the start of each chapter, covering everything from forests and savannahs to mountains and deserts. Then she is out in the real world, with people centre stage. After two years travelling, she has returned with a story of optimism about how 10 billion people can in future live together and prosper.

Too many travel books end up navel-gazing, or padded out with literary quotes. This one, however, is fresh and unencumbered. Vince glides from ecology to economics, politics to philosophy, seeing it all through the people she meets.

One minute she is interviewing a political leader, the next driving through a desert in a truck piled high with frankincense, singing songs to the air. Flip on a few pages and she is looking at satellite imagery of where water reserves might lurk, or discussing the metaphysics of wildness.

Vince has been to a few places I have been: where I can ground-truth her reporting, she is spot on.

In probably her best chapter, she drives to Lake Turkana in Kenya (see New Scientist, 21 June, p 42) to report on desert ecology, wind farms, tribal politics, the water cycle, ethnography, land-grabbing and the future of nomadism – but the stories and the lessons always come from the people she meets.

Vince finds heroes like Rosa Maria Ruiz, a Bolivian gold miner turned conservationist, and Vishwanath Srikantaiah, a water conservationist in Bangalore, India. She fulminates against land-grabbers, and missionaries who are "infecting the poor world with their beliefs". While Vince is a character in her narrative, this is never an egotistical odyssey. Nor is she romantic or naive. And she generally finds a rare balance between recognising the skill of traditional ways of living, and the realities of urbanisation, rising population and human ambition.

But that balance can go awry. Pondering whether hydroelectric dams on the Mekong river in Laos might make sense for the locals, she finds that "nostalgia for the untamed rivers of the Holocene is a pointless sentiment". Maybe, but that doesn't make dams right, nor the destruction of livelihoods that too often comes with them.

That aside, wherever she is and whatever she is thinking, Vince articulates the issues coolly. Her years as a reporter and editor – including at New Scientist – have given her a library of information and analysis that she uses well.

Vince heralds the slowdown in population growth, and embraces migrations. She is clear-eyed enough to see that pastoralism is the best use of dry lands and that cities are the most sustainable way to house us all. And she documents how the globalisation of economies, communications and environmental forces such as climate change remake the lives of even the most remote peoples. Thanks to "Tim Berners-Lee's brilliant toy... we are no longer a few individuals collaborating with a few more. We are a bigger, more beautiful creature: the organism of humanity," she writes.

Vince never denies that the Anthropocene could come to a sticky end, as brief and devastating as the aftermath of an asteroid strike. But I like her optimism and her faith in people, who she sees as "resourceful, intelligent and endlessly adaptable". We can make it, she says. Maybe we will.

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